0000000000054499
AUTHOR
C. Renaut
On chip shapeable optical tweezers
International audience; Particles manipulation with optical forces is known as optical tweezing. While tweezing in free space with laser beams was established in the 1980s, integrating the optical tweezers on a chip is a challenging task. Recent experiments with plasmonic nanoantennas, microring resonators, and photonic crystal nanocavities have demonstrated optical trapping. However, the optical field of a tweezer made of a single microscopic resonator cannot be shaped. So far, this prevents from optically driven micromanipulations. Here we propose an alternative approach where the shape of the optical trap can be tuned by the wavelength in coupled nanobeam cavities. Using these shapeable …
Optofluidic taming of a colloidal dimer with a silicon nanocavity
International audience; We report here the optical trapping of a heterogeneous colloidal dimer above a photonic crystal nanocavity used as an on-chip optical tweezer. The trapped dimer consists of a cluster of two dielectric microbeads of different sizes linked by van der Waals forces. The smallest bead, 1 μm in diameter, is observed to be preferentially trapped by the nanotweezer, leaving the second bead untrapped. The rotational nature of the trapped dimer Brownian motion is first evidenced. Then, in the presence of a fluid flow, control of its orientation and rotation is achieved. The whole system is found to show high rotational degrees of freedom, thereby acting as an effective flow-se…